Episode 14: Doing Business with ITS

Procurement. It’s a word that is often mentioned in relation to state government. We’ve referred to it more than once on this very podcast. 

Governor Kathy Hochul has talked about improving customer service and cultivating efficiency in government, including improving State procurement. The New York State Office of General Services works closely with the governor, the legislature, and the Division of the Budget to outline guidelines that determine state agency procurement procedures.

But what does “procurement” really mean? How does it affect how government agencies deliver crucial services to the people that need them? Why does it work the way it works, and how can it be better?

On this episode, David Burmaster, ITS Director of Procurement Services, talks about how this essential government function affects our agency’s mission and vision, including some best practices for doing business with ITS.

Thank you for listening to the IT’S a Tech Podcast. For more information about ITS, visit our website at its.ny.gov. Follow us on X, LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook.

Transcript

0:01
 You're listening to the IT's a Tech podcast, an engaging conversation about the gamechanging technology solutions being advanced by the state's Office of Information Technology Services.

 0:12
 Learn how ITS makes IT happen for more than 50 state agencies and over 20 million New Yorkers.

 0:23
 Procurement.

 0:24
 It's a word that is often mentioned in relation to state government.

 0:28
 We referred to it more than once on this very podcast.

 0:31
 Governor Kathy Hochul has talked about improving customer service and cultivating efficiency in government, including improving state procurement.

 0:39
 The New York State Office of General Services works closely with the Governor, the Legislature, and the Division of the Budget to outline guidelines that determine state agency procurement procedures.

 0:50
 But what does procurement really mean?

 0:53
 How does it affect how government agencies deliver crucial services to the people that need them?

 0:58
 Why does it work the way it works, and how can it be better?

 1:02
 On today's episode, David Burmaster, ITS Director of Procurement Services, talks about how this essential government function affects our agency's mission and vision, including some best practices for doing business with ITS.

 1:17
 David, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to share your expertise with us today.

 1:23
 Can you tell us how you came to this role with ITS and your experience with the agency so far?

 1:28
 Well, first, Natasha, thanks for having me here today.

 1:30
 It's been a long journey to join the ITS team, and I'm certainly glad to be aboard.

 1:34
 I first started as a contract management specialist back at the Office of Temporary and Disability Assistance in the mid 2000s.

 1:40
 Funny enough, working on IT staff augmentation agreements, helping identify IE service consultants for for our various program needs.

 1:49
 It was then recruited to work at the Office of General Services to help with our strategic sourcing initiative, which had a focus, funny enough, again on IT services.

 1:58
 So that's kind of where I've had a lot of my primary experience joining ITS. At OGS,

 2:03
 I actually developed and procured the first agreement that we now know as HBITS or hourly-based IT services and also help create the framework for what we know as PBITS, which is project-based IT services.

 2:16
 After my time at OGS, I went to work at the Office of the State Comptroller for about 10 years in the Bureau of Contracts.

 2:22
 This is the entity that actually reviews contracts from agencies such as ITS, where I oversaw several other executive agencies and really, you know, looking back, that's kind of where I honed the customer service skills.

 2:36
 And I remember actually working with some of my now predecessors at ITS to really develop those relationships with other procurement leads and procurement directors to help really get to positive outcomes.

 2:49
 From there, I had some time overseeing construction and real property and negotiated contract reviews.

 2:54
 And, you know, how I ended up here today, I had noticed a job opening about a year and a half ago.

 3:00
 I didn't really think much of it because you never know of, you know, making career changes at this stage.

 3:07
 It's a big decision for me, myself and my family.

 3:11
 And it was comfortable because I thought I was doing very well, which I was.

 3:15
 But it was really a perfect storm, frankly, that I ended up here today where sometimes you just have to take a chance.

 3:20
 You put your name out there and a series of events happened in a good way and found myself here for...to be able to help out.

 3:28
 So but I'm really glad I made the decision to just make that first initial outreach and just throw my hat in the ring.

 3:34
 Absolutely.

 3:34
 Well, it sounds like ITS has been in your orbit for many, many years and it's almost like you were, you were destined to to fill this role.

 3:42
 So you're here to talk about procurement, which is a word that our audience members probably have heard, probably even on this podcast, but some are only actually like super familiar with. What exactly does procurement mean when it comes to delivery of government services?

 3:59
 So from my perspective, procurement is a process and there's many stakeholders involved.

 4:05
 It's not buying and selling, which is what many people think it is.

 4:09
 Yes, that is an outcome of the procurement process, which is how we like to talk about it within VSMO, or vendor sourcing and management office.

 4:17
 It's ITS has a need and many of the agencies that ITS support because we have such a larger umbrella of the services that we provide to our client agencies, whether it's goods, whether it's services, technology, staff augmentation, cloud products, data storage.

 4:32
 It's really the procurement is how do we help meet that need.

 4:36
 Whether it is buying software, whether it is identifying consultant services to help us deploy, customize, implement, configure, whatever the need is.

 4:47
 How do we help our program units, our dedicated teams, our shared service leads, how do we help them match up with what is in the private sector?

 4:57
 How do and how do we work to identify those partnerships to get to an outcome?

 5:01
 Because we are a government agency. We provide services. Absolutely.

 5:07
 So you know, we're talking about procurement.

 5:10
 In terms of government services, there are a lot of guidelines and there are lots of rules around procurement.

 5:16
 What purpose do these guidelines serve and how does ITS work within these guidelines to obtain the resources that our people need to serve our client agencies?

 5:26
 Most importantly, we are stewards of the taxpayer dollar and everyone is interested.

 5:31
 I'm a taxpayer like most other folks listening on this call.

 5:35
 It's important, right, that we're spending the money correctly and we're getting great outcomes from the money that we are spending.

 5:42
 It's about fairness, it's about transparency, and my team works to really be the good shepherds and stewards of those processes that we have the appropriate guiderails and checkpoints in place to see that we're making correct decisions and that our calculations are correct.

 5:59
 We've asked the right questions during the processes, both of our program staff, of our budget colleagues, of our vendor partners who are actually bidding on our solicitations.

 6:12
 We want to also encourage competitive pricing, right, you know, coming up with the right type of information that we get, those best bits that are coming back to us.

 6:23
 And frankly, we have to be reasonable, right?

 6:25
 You know we have to document why we are doing things and what we call our procurement record and everyone has the ability to look at what we did and why we did it.

 6:35
 Because procurements are not just a one time event that you know that we are entering into several year agreements in some aspects.

 6:41
 And we want someone to always be able to look back at what we've done and go,

 6:45
 "I see why they made those decisions."

 6:47
 They had good rationale, there was good support for why they proceeded and that's very difficult given that there are so many guidelines and rules and regulations, re: our procurement.

 6:57
 So we're just trying to navigate that process as best we can. Exactly the the the good side of of red tape. Correct.

 7:06
 So you mentioned our vendor partners. What do vendors need to know to successfully bid on ITS open opportunities?

 7:14
 I think first is viewing ITS not as a customer only right.

 7:18
 It's a partnership.

 7:19
 We have both short and longer term needs.

 7:23
 I think understanding that we have a lot of public information that's already available for you specifically on our website that we've done some work on recently where we have all of our standard terms and conditions that are put for most of our solicitations.

 7:39
 You know, have your counsel take a look at those, identify some of the concerns that you may have and bring them up during the procurement process.

 7:47
 Utilize our question and answer period.

 7:49
 So most of our open market and even per our purchases off the centralized contracts have a question and answer period.

 7:57
 Everyone can ask questions and we want informed bids.

 8:01
 Utilize that time period so we can help you help us get to that best price or get to that better product offering that you might have, right?

 8:09
 We're looking for informed bids and proposals, not quotes given the what we're trying to do here.

 8:15
 We also have our standard forms, whether it's our what we like to call our administrator proposal or technical proposal forms or financial proposal forms.

 8:24
 Many of those do not deviate depending on the type of procurement.

 8:28
 There could be a few different rows in a financial form, but we try to be as standardized as as possible.

 8:35
 So we also can be quick in our time to market for those solicitations.

 8:39
 It's helpful that if you take the time to look at what we've already put out there to see how we like to encourage responses.

 8:46
 We're we want to keep doing that over and over again.

 8:49
 So it's not just asking us how do I bid on something, but utilize some of the resources that we already have out there now. Right.

 8:56
 Absolutely facilitate, you know, the, the, the standardization.

 9:01
 So just make the whole process work a little bit better. Correct.

 9:05
 To that point, and I know you mentioned it during your last answer, we talked about the improvements to the ITS website.

 9:12
 Can you talk a little bit more about these changes?

 9:16
 Yes, I was very excited to work with our communications team to make these updates.

 9:20
 Our number one priority was to make it easier to find the bid opportunities.

 9:28
 Being able to see well, I'm interested in working with ITS, what type of procurements do they have available right now? In our old manner, you have to scroll over and over and do all these click throughs just to see what we actually had that was going on

 9:42
 right now.  We're a fast-paced environment just like most of IT is.

 9:46
 So we now have just a very simple table as an example that you can click on all of our opportunities.

 9:54
 It's all on one page.

 9:55
 You don't have to search.

 9:56
 You can get a quick summary of whether it's our discretionary purchases or our open market IFBs or RFPs.

 10:03
 And then that brings you right to our actual citation documents.

 10:07
 We have our standardized forms all in one section.

 10:11
 We have a list of our restricted period

 10:12
 contacts all in one section.

 10:14
 We have all of our resources for potential MWBE and SDVOB partners all in one area.

 10:21
 We've tried to make it as easy as possible to get that information, which I'm very excited because no one wants to scroll through a government website forever and ever to find information.

 10:32
 But collaboratively with our communications team, I think we've really delivered a easier product that anyone trying to work with ITS in the future would be happy with.

 10:41
 Absolutely.

 10:42
 And as part of that team, we were happy to work with you as well because you know if there's information on our website that people can't get to, that's not doing anybody any favors.

 10:50
 So we were very, very happy to make those changes.

 10:54
 So we talked about improvements to the website.

 10:57
 We've talked about generally the guidelines and rules around procurement. What changes have been made to that whole procurement process fairly recently to make that work more efficiently while still remaining mindful of the fact that as you mentioned, we're we are stewards of of taxpayer dollars?

 11:15
 So with the changes that ITS has undergone over the past year, year and a half, two years depending on where we make that starting point, I think the office as we call VSMO, needed to reorganize to better meet our internal agency needs.

 11:30
 So with the introduction of our dedicated teams and our shared service teams, we've now accommodated a change internally that no matter what type of request comes in, we're able to route it to the right area.

 11:44
 So as an example, before I arrived here at ITS our staff augmentation contracts, we had many different teams that could handle it depending on the type of contract that it was.

 11:56
 But for our dedicated teams and our shared service leads, that shouldn't matter.

 12:01
 They have a need to find a resource and I believe it was our job to help guide them to the process that it they shouldn't have to go to two or three different areas.

 12:10
 So we as an example, we now have one staff augmentation team that handles and administers both our internal ITS contracts and working with our OGS contracts as well.

 12:22
 So if you have a consultant need, you have a single point of contact now.

 12:26
 Now after the initial intake process, we also have reorganized our Tier 1 and Tier 2 teams where we now have what's called our managed agency team.

 12:36
 So they will handle whether it's a discretionary purchase, whether it's an IFB, an RFP or even a single-source request.

 12:44
 We now have a single group that only handles all these solicitations.

 12:49
 So we're not routing a request to many different teams.

 12:53
 So our internal changes we've worked to accommodate the new model here at ITS and also provide better customer service.

 13:01
 When we've made those changes, that's now allowing us to reduce our overall processing timelines, which everyone is always interested in when it comes to procurement.

 13:10
 So we're able to reduce how much time it takes us to process internally and get to our what do we need to get the solicitation released?

 13:19
 What is the information we need for our financial evaluation instrument?

 13:24
 One of the other big changes we've made is we're asking vendors for input more frequently than we have in the past.

 13:31
 Not saying we didn't do that before but utilizing the contract reporter as an example to issue requests for information or RFIs, where we've done that with some recent initiatives where we're trying to show we need the input so we can make some big decisions.

 13:48
 The state's IT infrastructure is aging a bit, so we're trying to get ahead of the curve in many areas and we need help from the community to help us make those informed decisions.

 13:59
 And I would say the final thing I would like to highlight is our focus on EAs, or enterprise agreements, which is a major initiative for all of finance within ITS.

 14:09
 When we hear enterprise agreements, those are large agreements that are targeted for not only just ITS usage but also other executive agencies where they can see ITS as a solution to the procurement process.

 14:24
 Where we've done a lot of the research, we've done the negotiations, we've delivered a contract vehicle to help solve problems quickly be able to not hear, oh, I have a procurement need.

 14:38
 It's going to take a year.

 14:40
 We're developing frameworks where purchases can be done potentially in a week or two weeks by looking at a larger, a larger scope of contracts, right, big picture, big picture things.

 14:53
 So that's what we're trying to do now.

 14:55
 Absolutely.

 14:56
 So I think we've covered, you know, a good 30,000 foot overview of this whole idea.

 15:02
 At the end of the day, what is one thing you hope our listeners take away from this episode of the podcast, The procurement team, Bismo?

 15:10
 We are actively working to make it easier.

 15:13
 We are working to ensure we have the right resources, that we are training internally, that we are listening and having dialogue with our dedicated teams and our shared services.

 15:25
 We are trying to work faster and also develop solutions not only just for doing procurements faster, but looking at technology that helps us help everyone else as well.

 15:35
 So we hear the procurement timeline concerns that are out there and we are trying, you know, because it's not easy and everyone in ITS is very difficult and challenging jobs.

 15:46
 Ours is one of them and we are we are listening and we're trying to help to the best of our ability.

 15:53
 And I think we've made a lot of progress frankly in the last you know six months in particular.

 15:57
 Exactly.

 15:57
 Efficiency takes time and we are putting in the effort here at ITS.

 16:01
 Yes, we are.

 16:02
 I love that.

 16:03
 David, we are almost out of time for this discussion.

 16:06
 But before you leave I have one final question that we ask all of our guests.

 16:11
 What is one thing you are looking forward to the most this year?

 16:15
 It does not have to be, but it can be work related.

 16:19
 Well, I'll say from the work related perspective, I am looking forward to completing some of our groundbreaking enterprise agreements.

 16:27
 I think we're all looking forward to that.

 16:30
 ITS has the ability and we have the resources and support from our leadership to make some of these EAS happen.

 16:37
 And these are challenging complex agreements that when we are able to get them approved, and I'm confident we can, we have the right folks involved in the next year, we're going to show that, you know, things are different and we have the ability to take on these types of challenges and help not only just at a micro level, but the macro level as well.

 17:00
 I know it was work related.

 17:01
 I had to share it because I'm very passionate about this and negotiating and looking after the state's taxpayer dollar.

 17:08
 So this is an area that I'm personally invested in making sure this is successful for the agency.

 17:14
 Absolutely.

 17:16
 Well, David, thank you so much for being our guest today and for helping ITS deliver these crucial services to New Yorkers in an efficient way.

 17:24
 No, and thank you for having me today, Natasha.

 17:26
 I appreciate it.

 17:26
 Absolutely.

 17:27
 Thank you for listening to It's a Tech Podcast.

 17:30
 For more information about ITS, visit ourwebsite@its.ny.gov.